The Trumpet - A Delight for the Primal Senses essays

The Trumpet - A Delight for the Primal Senses essays The trumpet invokes the primal sense stimuli of sound, sight, and touch through its evocative use of melody, tone, and rhythm. The trumpet, of all the brass instruments, is the one that sounds the most like a human voice. It usually provides the melody of a jazz work because of the clear, bell-like sound of its notes. Its tone is one of clarity that can cut through the noise of a crowd or audience at an orchestra. Its noise rises above the dull thump of the lower-toned base instruments like the tuba, the drone of the woodwinds, and the buzz of the string instruments. Even an untrained ear can identify the sound of a trumpet, almost as if its sound was hard-wired into the brain from birth. When there is no singer, the trumpet is the voice of the orchestra. Like children respond to their mothers voices, so we respond to the voice of the trumpet out of this primal memory, this love of speech and articulation. The trumpets quick notes of brightness, unlike the more mellow and difficult tones of different sections of the orchestra need no training to understand because they speak to the heart of the listener. Because of its communicative power, a trumpet has been used when fighting wars and training troops. Once upon a time, no fighting unit was complete without a trumpet. A trumpet can speak to sleeping solders when it acts as a bugle to rally people awake, or to send the soldiers asleep during taps. Even many childrens camps have buglers to rally the young campers awake and to send them to sleep at night. A trumpet can also sound a call of triumph, one reason that angels are often depicted playing trumpets. Trumpets caused the walls of Jericho to come tumbling down with their clear tenor voices, enabling justice to triumph, and announced the birth of prophets. In many Christmas carols, the sound of the trumpet is one of the featured instruments, like Hark the Herald Angels Sing. ...